Uh- Babylon 5 was NEVER meant to go beyond Season 5- the story arc completed. In fact, because it nearly didn't have a Season 5, they rushed some parts of the story arc to complete in Season 4. There was no way B5 was EVER going to go beyond 5 seasons except maybe as a sequel focusing not on the station, but on something/someone else (David Sheridan as a ranger, or the Crusaders looking for the cure to the Drak plague- though the second of those had a built in 5 season time limit too if TNT hadn't have gotten cold feet).
Reading ahead- the new enemy doesn't seem to be very new- just an old enemy in a new form (replicators played by Carter). Unless, of course- the Wraith have intergalactic capability.
Its also a plainly obvious point - about as enlightening as saying "insightful" statements like "Money does not grow on trees" or "The sun sets at night" or "If people do not get food, they starve"
And yet, we persist in making comments like "The United States is the land of freedom" that attracts someplace between 2-3 million immigrants a year; thus it is NOT obvious, is it?
Whoever said that I condone their behavior? The fact that I am not firing rocket launchers at every corporate HQ around does not imply that I condone their behavior. Call me naive, but maybe I expect more from somewhat intellectual/. posters.
Uh- ok. If you're not sticking up for the corporations and their behavior, including the lie that the United States is a free country- then what's your beef?
Sorry, been here for six years and never read a single journals. Who actually does?
I do- I often find them as interesting as the front page stories. More interesting in a way- they broaden my mind to new ideas.
Most people aren't lucky enough to have scholarships OR loans- and in comparison to the total cost of training, the salary is indeed quite bad. That's my only point- and I think we've argued this down to this one point- that businesses are indeed taking advantage of the generosity of their workers and in some cases other people that helped their workers- without actually paying for the full cost of aquiring those skills. Unlike you- I'm of the opinion that if a business needs social support, it shouldn't be in business at all- one of the primary axioms of my form of economics is that you don't get to take profit from other people's work EVER. Doing so is nothing more than petty theft, regardless of how many laws the corporations have passed to make it legal.
I would define interest transitively. Thus, if I am interested in A, which depends on B, I think it's reasonable to say that I'm interested in (at least) the subset of B that is relevant to A.
But chances are, you're only interested in that subset- and will stop learning there.
Without such interest, no one could ever learn a complex topic like calculus.
Not entirely true- some people DO have an interest in mathematics for the sake of the mathematical puzzle- and for them, calculus is a shortcut to the type of iteration it would otherwise take a computer to approximate.
Note that A can be something very practical (like graduating from high school) at the same time that B is very abstract (like calculus).
Ok- I stand corrected- some handguns DO have this much stopping power- a sudden loss of oil pressure through a cracked engine block will certainly stop just about anything more modern than a WWII Ford flathead.
Like I said- depends on the size of your globe...8000x5280=42240000 feet is the diameter of the planet, thus the ratio would be 16/42240000 or.00000037878787878...
Measure your globe in whatever unit you wish, multiply by 3.787878787xe-7, and you'll have the size of this meteriod.
Just because mathematics and science shows us some surprising correlations, does NOT mean that every problem can be solved with mathematics or every theory can come from science. This essay only proves the point behind WHY lay people can be utterly uninterested in Mathematics and still be completely functioning human beings.
Recently in my journal entry on Atheism and Iltheism I pointed this out- that it is equally plausible, from all we now know about energy and brain chemistry, that a soul exists as that no soul exists; simply because we have been unable to accurately and repeatedly measure energy in vs energy out of the human body at death. Thus, whether the brain is the cause of thought or merely an interpreter of thought that originates with a non-corporeal soul, is utterly unproven and perhaps unproveable.
Part of learning mathematics is learning to communicate your thoughts in an unambiguous manner. This is an important and useful lesson even for lay persons such as yourself.
The ambiguousness is on purpose- the world is not unambiguous and neither is humanity- thus learning to communicate your thoughts in an unambiguous manner is neither important nor usefull in all situations, and can sometimes be uttlerly non-usefull.
A mathematician is like a guy with a hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail- some problems are non-mathematical to begin with.
Heck, I've seen BOULDERS bigger than that (if you ever visit Central Oregon, the High Desert Museum has one about that size sitting on top of a car- it's pumice obviously). That ain't no asteroid, that's a meteor.
How does rejecting 735 ballots from Democrats because their names weren't in the computer system (but had been in the paper record for several years) not indicate bias?
You realise you've just described classical money supply theory? I thought you thought that was all crap?
And yet- who listened? We just layed people off left, right, and center and replaced them with "guest workers" of various stripes. And many of those people are STILL unemployed- three years later.
Explain that, please, to my three American co-workers who did accept jobs at that price at my company.
Ask them how they're doing repaying their student loans- and what they would have required for salary just a few years before.
I'm sorry, but I've worked with folks who just have high school diplomas, and none of them could have been trained to do my job. They were a bit thick. I'm sure there are exceptions to that, but watch out for those sweeping generalisations, chief - it reveals you to be overly fond of polemic, less so of the supporting data.
Plenty of them out there refute this- and you're the one making the sweeping generalization. For instance, one guy by the name of William Gates III has only a high school education- he dropped out of college to start Microsoft back in the day.
You realize, of course, that the SAG Annual Salary Report is compiled from contributions from technical workers, not management or some shadowy quasi-government control group?
And who allows those technical workers to answer the survey? Who pays for their time to do so? And who are these "technical workers" anyway, when nobody bothered to ask at any company I've ever worked for (and in fact, most of those companies had rules about discussing salary at all, in hopes of keeping us from organizing the workers).
The sample size is quite extensive, and reflects the price the market is willing to pay for someone of my skills.
I fully believe that one! In fact, it's my main point- that the reason for the so-called "shortages" where companies can't find workers is because they're not willing to pay those workers what they are worth!
Tell me, do you think the average lay person could understand the first five pages of _Moby Dick_, or a Shakespeare play, or an Emily Dickinson poem? I think not -- yet I don't hear anyone dissuading them from trying.
You obviousely didn't go to MY high school- where only the smart kids trying to get college credit ahead of schedule read anything by Herman Melville or Emily Dickinson, and the only required play for Shakespeare was Romeo and Juliet- and for that they showed the movie instead of having kids read the play.
(And, frankly, anyone who is competent in calculus can't really be considered uninterested in math.)
It's possible, for a good student to be competant in something that they're not interested in- simply because they ARE interested in something else that depends on that topic.
Only if you hit it very precisely, and wait for the radiator to drain and the engine to sieze (for some reason, in the movies, this always happens instantly- where in my mind even if you hit a pipe at the bottom of the radiator, I think the truck could probably continue for a mile or two before the heat got to it).
The key word here is "ANY" degree of precision- close enough to achieve some great things is NOT equal to any degree of precision. Achieving great things is also not equal to achieving common things that can be achieved in other ways. Mathematics is not the end-all way to model the universe, yet. It's close. It's as close as the number of bytes of precision you want to do it in. But it will NEVER model the universe completely- and it's unreasonable to expect lay people to be interested in a method that doesn't model their particular part of the universe. Thus leading back to my original comment- that lay people are only interested in the amount of mathematics that can model THEIR particular slice of the universe, and due to holes in how we understand numbers themselves, that amount is not very complete.
That's a red herring, childling. You said that there are Americans available for a job, and I showed that there weren't. Nothing more is required.
8 million Americans are currently unemployed, and you couldn't find a single ONE to train?
(Oh, and to give you a sense of scale: starting employees here get three weeks payed vacation per year, plus many other non-working days, full medical (no copay for any meds, no premiums, etc.), generous dental (up to three periodontal procedures per year, for instance), and other beneifts as well. Salaries are above the 80th percentile in the industry nationwide.)
When you consider that the entire damned industry is in a DEPRESSION, saying that your salaries are above the 80th percentile means NOTHING other than that you're paying the same slave wages of everybody else who can't afford the training that they are requiring. If your salaries even equaled the cost of training, there'd be tons of people in school RIGHT NOW learning your shop's coding methods in hopes of getting jobs. But in reality- you're requiring so much that you'd have to pay $100,000/year salaries in a low-rent area just to break even on the training cost. That's what gets to me about private industry- nobody seems to have ANY CLUE how to pay the wages neccessary to get and retain good people. So because of the disparity- 8 million Americans go unemployed, and we bring in 2 million a year from other countries.
I'm sorry - I didn't know you knew the particulars of my case.;-p You're wrong, by the way - I was paid *exactly* what the DoL said I should have been paid for my job description and experience, based on the prevailing wages established by, amongst others, SAG.
And that's how I know the particulars of your case- because 95% of what an ENTRY LEVEL position should have been is exactly what the DoL and SAG established based on job description and experience. You really didn't think that an industry group bought and paid for by the corps could be trusted to achieve an unbiased report, did you?
In short, when I was working as a Student under EAD, I was paid $44K/yr. The *second* my H1-B came through, my salary was raised to $65K a year, which was exactly what the average wage was then for a Systems Administrator in Boston.
Funny- all of the schools were quoting $70k MINIMUM for that same position, entry level, nationwide. Still are- the reality of the depression of wages has yet to catch up to them, ORTech in fact successfully prosecuted New Horizons Learning Centers in Oregon on the truth in advertising law using these concepts. So basically- you repalced a $70k/year American for a job that any high school diploma could be trained for. Over a 6 year visa, that ould be about a $15,000 profit to the company after the legal costs of hiring you as an H-1b had been settled. Very nice profit for the shareholders, very big destruction of profit for American workers.
Oh, I'm sure that your company *claimed* to have tried to recruit Americans first and failed- but then again, given the depression in wages in comparison to the cost of the education, no American would have taken the job at that price.
Slashdot Mirror
As the father of a 19-month-old wondering when in hell I'll be able to teach him C++- probably just old enough to be getting interesting.
Uh- Babylon 5 was NEVER meant to go beyond Season 5- the story arc completed. In fact, because it nearly didn't have a Season 5, they rushed some parts of the story arc to complete in Season 4. There was no way B5 was EVER going to go beyond 5 seasons except maybe as a sequel focusing not on the station, but on something/someone else (David Sheridan as a ranger, or the Crusaders looking for the cure to the Drak plague- though the second of those had a built in 5 season time limit too if TNT hadn't have gotten cold feet).
Reading ahead- the new enemy doesn't seem to be very new- just an old enemy in a new form (replicators played by Carter). Unless, of course- the Wraith have intergalactic capability.
Its also a plainly obvious point - about as enlightening as saying "insightful" statements like "Money does not grow on trees" or "The sun sets at night" or "If people do not get food, they starve"
/. posters.
And yet, we persist in making comments like "The United States is the land of freedom" that attracts someplace between 2-3 million immigrants a year; thus it is NOT obvious, is it?
Whoever said that I condone their behavior? The fact that I am not firing rocket launchers at every corporate HQ around does not imply that I condone their behavior. Call me naive, but maybe I expect more from somewhat intellectual
Uh- ok. If you're not sticking up for the corporations and their behavior, including the lie that the United States is a free country- then what's your beef?
Sorry, been here for six years and never read a single journals. Who actually does?
I do- I often find them as interesting as the front page stories. More interesting in a way- they broaden my mind to new ideas.
Damn it, should have hit preview. 514cm=5 METERS! This guy is using a weather balloon for a globe!
Boy that's a large globe- taking the figures from my first message, your globe is ~514CM in diameter- nearly a half a meter....
Most people aren't lucky enough to have scholarships OR loans- and in comparison to the total cost of training, the salary is indeed quite bad. That's my only point- and I think we've argued this down to this one point- that businesses are indeed taking advantage of the generosity of their workers and in some cases other people that helped their workers- without actually paying for the full cost of aquiring those skills. Unlike you- I'm of the opinion that if a business needs social support, it shouldn't be in business at all- one of the primary axioms of my form of economics is that you don't get to take profit from other people's work EVER. Doing so is nothing more than petty theft, regardless of how many laws the corporations have passed to make it legal.
I would define interest transitively. Thus, if I am interested in A, which depends on B, I think it's reasonable to say that I'm interested in (at least) the subset of B that is relevant to A.
But chances are, you're only interested in that subset- and will stop learning there.
Without such interest, no one could ever learn a complex topic like calculus.
Not entirely true- some people DO have an interest in mathematics for the sake of the mathematical puzzle- and for them, calculus is a shortcut to the type of iteration it would otherwise take a computer to approximate.
Note that A can be something very practical (like graduating from high school) at the same time that B is very abstract (like calculus).
This, though, is completely true.
Ok- I stand corrected- some handguns DO have this much stopping power- a sudden loss of oil pressure through a cracked engine block will certainly stop just about anything more modern than a WWII Ford flathead.
Like I said- depends on the size of your globe...8000x5280=42240000 feet is the diameter of the planet, thus the ratio would be 16/42240000 or .00000037878787878...
Measure your globe in whatever unit you wish, multiply by 3.787878787xe-7, and you'll have the size of this meteriod.
Just because mathematics and science shows us some surprising correlations, does NOT mean that every problem can be solved with mathematics or every theory can come from science. This essay only proves the point behind WHY lay people can be utterly uninterested in Mathematics and still be completely functioning human beings.
Recently in my journal entry on Atheism and Iltheism I pointed this out- that it is equally plausible, from all we now know about energy and brain chemistry, that a soul exists as that no soul exists; simply because we have been unable to accurately and repeatedly measure energy in vs energy out of the human body at death. Thus, whether the brain is the cause of thought or merely an interpreter of thought that originates with a non-corporeal soul, is utterly unproven and perhaps unproveable.
Part of learning mathematics is learning to communicate your thoughts in an unambiguous manner. This is an important and useful lesson even for lay persons such as yourself.
The ambiguousness is on purpose- the world is not unambiguous and neither is humanity- thus learning to communicate your thoughts in an unambiguous manner is neither important nor usefull in all situations, and can sometimes be uttlerly non-usefull.
A mathematician is like a guy with a hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail- some problems are non-mathematical to begin with.
along with a rectifier (since your house expects AC)
Inverter you mean- rectifier changes AC to DC, inverter on a DC clock changes DC to AC.
And the size of a grain of salt....or probably less, depending on the size of your globe.
Heck, I've seen BOULDERS bigger than that (if you ever visit Central Oregon, the High Desert Museum has one about that size sitting on top of a car- it's pumice obviously). That ain't no asteroid, that's a meteor.
How does rejecting 735 ballots from Democrats because their names weren't in the computer system (but had been in the paper record for several years) not indicate bias?
You realise you've just described classical money supply theory? I thought you thought that was all crap?
And yet- who listened? We just layed people off left, right, and center and replaced them with "guest workers" of various stripes. And many of those people are STILL unemployed- three years later.
Explain that, please, to my three American co-workers who did accept jobs at that price at my company.
Ask them how they're doing repaying their student loans- and what they would have required for salary just a few years before.
I'm sorry, but I've worked with folks who just have high school diplomas, and none of them could have been trained to do my job. They were a bit thick. I'm sure there are exceptions to that, but watch out for those sweeping generalisations, chief - it reveals you to be overly fond of polemic, less so of the supporting data.
Plenty of them out there refute this- and you're the one making the sweeping generalization. For instance, one guy by the name of William Gates III has only a high school education- he dropped out of college to start Microsoft back in the day.
You realize, of course, that the SAG Annual Salary Report is compiled from contributions from technical workers, not management or some shadowy quasi-government control group?
And who allows those technical workers to answer the survey? Who pays for their time to do so? And who are these "technical workers" anyway, when nobody bothered to ask at any company I've ever worked for (and in fact, most of those companies had rules about discussing salary at all, in hopes of keeping us from organizing the workers).
The sample size is quite extensive, and reflects the price the market is willing to pay for someone of my skills.
I fully believe that one! In fact, it's my main point- that the reason for the so-called "shortages" where companies can't find workers is because they're not willing to pay those workers what they are worth!
Tell me, do you think the average lay person could understand the first five pages of _Moby Dick_, or a Shakespeare play, or an Emily Dickinson poem? I think not -- yet I don't hear anyone dissuading them from trying.
You obviousely didn't go to MY high school- where only the smart kids trying to get college credit ahead of schedule read anything by Herman Melville or Emily Dickinson, and the only required play for Shakespeare was Romeo and Juliet- and for that they showed the movie instead of having kids read the play.
(And, frankly, anyone who is competent in calculus can't really be considered uninterested in math.)
It's possible, for a good student to be competant in something that they're not interested in- simply because they ARE interested in something else that depends on that topic.
Only if you hit it very precisely, and wait for the radiator to drain and the engine to sieze (for some reason, in the movies, this always happens instantly- where in my mind even if you hit a pipe at the bottom of the radiator, I think the truck could probably continue for a mile or two before the heat got to it).
The key word here is "ANY" degree of precision- close enough to achieve some great things is NOT equal to any degree of precision. Achieving great things is also not equal to achieving common things that can be achieved in other ways. Mathematics is not the end-all way to model the universe, yet. It's close. It's as close as the number of bytes of precision you want to do it in. But it will NEVER model the universe completely- and it's unreasonable to expect lay people to be interested in a method that doesn't model their particular part of the universe. Thus leading back to my original comment- that lay people are only interested in the amount of mathematics that can model THEIR particular slice of the universe, and due to holes in how we understand numbers themselves, that amount is not very complete.
Yeah, because we all know that Windows 3.1 was just so usefull.
That's a red herring, childling. You said that there are Americans available for a job, and I showed that there weren't. Nothing more is required.
8 million Americans are currently unemployed, and you couldn't find a single ONE to train?
(Oh, and to give you a sense of scale: starting employees here get three weeks payed vacation per year, plus many other non-working days, full medical (no copay for any meds, no premiums, etc.), generous dental (up to three periodontal procedures per year, for instance), and other beneifts as well. Salaries are above the 80th percentile in the industry nationwide.)
When you consider that the entire damned industry is in a DEPRESSION, saying that your salaries are above the 80th percentile means NOTHING other than that you're paying the same slave wages of everybody else who can't afford the training that they are requiring. If your salaries even equaled the cost of training, there'd be tons of people in school RIGHT NOW learning your shop's coding methods in hopes of getting jobs. But in reality- you're requiring so much that you'd have to pay $100,000/year salaries in a low-rent area just to break even on the training cost. That's what gets to me about private industry- nobody seems to have ANY CLUE how to pay the wages neccessary to get and retain good people. So because of the disparity- 8 million Americans go unemployed, and we bring in 2 million a year from other countries.
I'm sorry - I didn't know you knew the particulars of my case. ;-p You're wrong, by the way - I was paid *exactly* what the DoL said I should have been paid for my job description and experience, based on the prevailing wages established by, amongst others, SAG.
And that's how I know the particulars of your case- because 95% of what an ENTRY LEVEL position should have been is exactly what the DoL and SAG established based on job description and experience. You really didn't think that an industry group bought and paid for by the corps could be trusted to achieve an unbiased report, did you?
In short, when I was working as a Student under EAD, I was paid $44K/yr. The *second* my H1-B came through, my salary was raised to $65K a year, which was exactly what the average wage was then for a Systems Administrator in Boston.
Funny- all of the schools were quoting $70k MINIMUM for that same position, entry level, nationwide. Still are- the reality of the depression of wages has yet to catch up to them, ORTech in fact successfully prosecuted New Horizons Learning Centers in Oregon on the truth in advertising law using these concepts. So basically- you repalced a $70k/year American for a job that any high school diploma could be trained for. Over a 6 year visa, that ould be about a $15,000 profit to the company after the legal costs of hiring you as an H-1b had been settled. Very nice profit for the shareholders, very big destruction of profit for American workers.
Oh, I'm sure that your company *claimed* to have tried to recruit Americans first and failed- but then again, given the depression in wages in comparison to the cost of the education, no American would have taken the job at that price.